Sanati Nezhad A
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, USA.
Lab Chip. 2014 Sep 7;14(17):3262-74. doi: 10.1039/c4lc00495g.
Conventional methods of plant cell analysis rely on growing plant cells in soil pots or agarose plates, followed by screening the plant phenotypes in traditional greenhouses and growth chambers. These methods are usually costly, need a large number of experiments, suffer from low spatial resolution and disorderly growth behavior of plant cells, with lack of ability to locally and accurately manipulate the plant cells. Microfluidic platforms take advantage of miniaturization for handling small volume of liquids and providing a closed environment, with the purpose of in vitro single cell analysis and characterizing cell response to external cues. These platforms have shown their ability for high-throughput cellular analysis with increased accuracy of experiments, reduced cost and experimental times, versatility in design, ability for large-scale and combinatorial screening, and integration with other miniaturized sensors. Despite extensive research on animal cells within microfluidic environments for high-throughput sorting, manipulation and phenotyping studies, the application of microfluidics for plant cells studies has not been accomplished yet. Novel devices such as RootChip, RootArray, TipChip, and PlantChip developed for plant cells analysis, with high spatial resolution on a micrometer scale mimicking the internal microenvironment of plant cells, offering preliminary results on the capability of microfluidics to conquer the constraints of conventional methods. These devices have been used to study different aspects of plant cell biology such as gene expression, cell biomechanics, cellular mechanism of growth, cell division, and cells fusion. This review emphasizes the advantages of current microfluidic systems for plant science studies, and discusses future prospects of microfluidic platforms for characterizing plant cells response to diverse external cues.
传统的植物细胞分析方法依赖于在花盆土壤或琼脂平板中培养植物细胞，然后在传统温室和生长室中筛选植物表型。这些方法通常成本高昂，需要大量实验，存在空间分辨率低和植物细胞生长行为无序的问题，并且缺乏对植物细胞进行局部和精确操作的能力。微流控平台利用小型化来处理少量液体并提供封闭环境，目的是进行体外单细胞分析并表征细胞对外部信号的反应。这些平台已显示出它们具有高通量细胞分析能力，实验准确性提高，成本和实验时间减少，设计具有多功能性，具备大规模和组合筛选能力，以及能与其他小型化传感器集成。尽管在微流控环境中对动物细胞进行高通量分选、操作和表型研究已有广泛研究，但微流控技术在植物细胞研究中的应用尚未实现。为植物细胞分析开发的新型设备，如RootChip、RootArray、TipChip和PlantChip，在微米尺度上具有高空间分辨率，模拟植物细胞的内部微环境，为微流控技术克服传统方法的局限性提供了初步结果。这些设备已被用于研究植物细胞生物学的不同方面，如基因表达、细胞生物力学、生长的细胞机制、细胞分裂和细胞融合。本综述强调了当前微流控系统在植物科学研究中的优势，并讨论了微流控平台在表征植物细胞对各种外部信号反应方面的未来前景。
